Deadnauts, so named because they’re unlikely to return, must explore, investigate and fight their way through the derelict ships of dead civilisations. Every mission is unique and no two locations are the same. Each ship contains mysterious enemies and hostile security systems.

Manage your Deadnauts’ skills, talents, relationships and flaws – and you might get them out alive.

Squad-based tactics: Control five complex characters as they explore, investigate and fight their way through each mission.

Character generation: Create back stories for your team, mould their relationships and equip them well.

Every game is unique: Dynamically-generated missions and campaigns ensure no two mysteries are the same.

Flexible and complex: Adapt to your situation with an arsenal of weapons and shields, or use stealth, hacking and sensors to move unnoticed.

Out of control: Deadnauts have their own fears, motivations and dispositions. Stay in charge, keep in contact, don’t let them out of your sight.

Due out in October for Windows, Mac and Linux, Deadnaut is a game set in a future where humanity finally makes it to the stars, only to discover it’s the only civilisation left. Everyone else was wiped out long ago and it’s up to you and your team of five guns-for-hire to figure out what happened.

Along with a refined and improved relationship system, like that seen in Zafehouse, Deadnaut introduces the concept of stability, where the mental state of your characters requires monitoring as they delve into increasingly more terrifying and disturbing mysteries. If a character doesn’t like confined spaces, they’ll react negatively if left in a small corridor, while someone unsettled by death will have a hard time moving through a derelict starship full of corpses. Continue reading ‘Announcing Deadnaut, a new Screwfly game of tactical sci-fi horror’

After ten months of development, we decided it was time to reveal Zafehouse: Diaries, the debut game from Screwfly Studios. It’s the spiritual successor to Zafehouse, a game I made in seven days about five years ago. Since then, I’ve been tinkering at creating a sequel to encompass much more of the zombie apocalypse experience. Two prototypes were created over the last couple of years, until I finally landed on something I felt could work. Continue reading ‘Zafehouse: Diaries is alive!’

I had a few requests to add support for Pathfinder to my lightweight D&D initiative tracker. I also took the opportunity to address a few bugs people had pointed out. Oh, and there’s a new icon so it matches the rest of my role-playing tools such as CrawlNotes for dungeon mapping and the 4e Power Toolkit.

Here’s a list of changes:

– Added support for Pathfinder. Touch AC, Flat-Footed AC and CMD can now be entered for combatants.

– Reactivated the heal / wound buttons from v0.4. Back by popular demand!

– Fixed a bug that prevented negative values for most statistics.

– Fixed a bug that would cause the program to crash if negative values were entered for Listen / Spot skills.

– Fixed a bug with the random number generator that would set the maximum value for a random roll to be one less than the actual maximum (so a d20 would be 1-19).

Certain recent events threw a giant spanner in the works for all Zafehouse-related activity. I can’t 100% say that I’m in the clear, but at the moment it looks like I’ll be able to continue working on the game. Sorry for not being able to provide anything more conclusive than that (or sooner than today). :(

Rewrote the event system. It’s more flexible now and uses tokens and delegates to deliver more dynamic text. Very modular and much needed given the increasing scope of the game.

Focus is now very much on the survivors. I’ve always been quite adamant about the state of zombie games these days being about shooting and looting rather than the characters. Zafehouse 2 is very much a story about people, not the undead they slaughter. That, and a particular Flash game that reinforced my desire to move away from the “Civilization: Zombies” gameplay.

Don’t worry, you still have to barricade and scavenge for supplies, and the systems behind these are robust. But managing the emotional and physical needs of your survivors will be just as important (if not more so).

Time was too granular. The game now has 6 phases, with shorter, more frequent “activity blocks” during the night and longer ones during the day. For example: 6am-12pm, 12pm-6pm, 6pm-9pm, etc. The distribution / length of these phases has yet to be finalised. I wanted to bring back the feeling of dread one gets as day transitions to night. I thought it was a highlight of the first game and Zafehouse 2 wasn’t really replicating that. It also removes the oddity of “if I’d had one minute extra I’d have finished that barricade” which was extremely jarring.

I think the Direct3D renderer might have issues on some newer mobile GFX chips, in particular Intel / GeForce configurations using Optimus. But I can’t confirm it. I guess that’s what the beta will be for!

About three weeks ago, I put the finishing touches on the Direct3D 9 renderer for Zafehouse 2. Previously, the game exclusively used GDI+, the default graphics API for .NET. Now it runs on a bizarre fusion, with Direct3D performing compositing and GDI+ painting the final image onto the screen.

Well, except when I use native GDI calls to paint instead. Actually, now that I think about it, GDI+ doesn’t do a heck of a lot for Zafehouse 2 anymore.

Now, this change raises a number of questions: Why not use Direct3D for the entire process? Why change APIs in the first place? Isn’t the Direct2D API in DirectX 10+ basically what you’re describing?